


A Life of Ashes

by Ellanna_Heart



Category: Fallout (Video Games), Fallout 1, Fallout 2, Fallout 3, Fallout 4, Fallout 76, Fallout Shelter (Video Game), Fallout: Brotherhood of Steel, Fallout: New Vegas, Fallout: Nuka Break (Web Series)
Genre: F/M
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2019-04-01
Updated: 2019-04-03
Packaged: 2019-12-30 12:31:27
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings, Graphic Depictions Of Violence, Rape/Non-Con
Chapters: 2
Words: 2,530
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18315317
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Ellanna_Heart/pseuds/Ellanna_Heart
Summary: This story is based on a character I have played at Live-Action-Role-Play events, for a game called Wasteland UK. Many of the events depicted in this story were acted out in real life, while many others were either written as part of on-going plot, or I have added in to make more sense of the story. The game is inspired by the Fallout video game series. The character Ashe is one that i created and still continue to play from time to time.This is her story, told from her perspective.





	1. Intro

In the year 2077 the world stood still as the bombs fell from the sky. People could do nothing but watch as the world around them ended and dissolved into chaos. Many considered those that died in the blasts the lucky ones. For only suffering awaited the survivors. There was no country unaffected. No one that didn’t retaliate. No one cared that the world would be destroyed. There would be no winners in The War. But there never are, not really.

The United Kingdom was among the devastated countries. No one knows who bombed who. It didn’t matter, the result was the same everywhere. The citizens of London were under illusion that the city would be a prime target. The Underground could only house 100,000 people within its walls out of the 8 million that lived there. But during a time of war propaganda, it was said that it could fit a lot more. When the sirens rang thousands desperately sought shelter inside. Those that made it would soon discover how difficult a life it would be. Little food and water and cramped conditions. Those closer to the surface had no protection against the radiation that slowly leaked through. The low-level radiation exposure over time wrought slow, agonizing misery on those below and soon peoples' hair and skin began to fall apart. These people quickly became mutants of a very particular kind: radiation poisoning sufferers. Rather than death, these victims had their life extended but with pain, irritation and infection to deal with.

Once rations began to run out, gangs formed of the particular Underground stations they lived in began to fight with each other, for resources like food and electricity. After several horrible years, one man stepped up to quell the butchery of the London Underground. Freddie Noone, pre-war businessman, promised access to his personal stores of food if people could "pay" him with Meantime Brewery bottlecaps and thus he created the bottlecap 'standard'. 5 caps could buy you an unlabelled tin of food while 10 could buy you a labelled tin. A small economy, tied to the value of food, was born.  
Once the ghouls tunnelled out beyond London and the '25 Orbital Motorway, headed by Mr Noone, the influence of the bottlecap spread across the country, giving scavengers a workable system of bartering and money. You'll find Ghouls in amongst most settlements now, but ask most of them and they'll tell you they came from the Underground of London.

Thus, life continued after the world ended. As the years went on the population began to slowly rise. Not by much but enough for the country to keep on ticking along. It wasn’t an easy ride however. Slavery became common place in the Midlands, with Brum being the Slave Capitol of the UK. Raider gangs popped up all over the country, preying on the weak and defenceless. Stealing and killing. To the south-west a different culture began to emerge, Woads. The Woads can only be described as the bastard child of the pre-war Hippy movement and the old Celtic mythology of the British Isles. Little is known about their people or their way of life as most scavengers don't survive an encounter with them. What is known is that they are incredibly anti-technology... and even though it seems to be back to rocks and sticks with them their way of life doesn't seem to have been worsened by it.

Every community creates their own way living and surviving the Wasteland. Every person decides where they want their journey to go, if they have the luxury of choice.  
I am one such survivor and I want to tell my story. A story of growing and living in the apocalypse. I want other survivors to know that it is possible to thrive and live a life that is full of wonderful possibilities. It wasn’t an easy journey by any means. This will be story of hardship, death, loss and heartbreak. But this story also has hope, friendship and love. 

My name is Ashe and this is the story of my life in the Wasteland.


	2. Found in Blood

Year: 2136

I never knew my birth parents. I was told that they had been killed just days after I was born. They lived among a small settlement of people, a group that would travel from place to place never stopping for too long. On the day that Nathan found me he had followed a trail of smoke he saw reaching high into the sky. The camp he found was destroyed. Tents and hastily built shacks, ripped apart and set on fire. He searched the area looking for anything useful but didn’t find much. When he was about to leave, he heard a baby crying. He followed the noise to a small tent with one single camp bed inside. He found the bodies of two people in there lying on the ground face down. One was a woman who looked like she had been severely beaten and raped. The other body, a male, seemed as though he had been beaten and shot to death. The woman’s body lay next to the bed, the entire floor was covered in blood.

The crying came from under the bed; Nathan carefully moved the bodies away to the side and looked under it. He saw a bundle wrapped in cloth and soaked in blood. At first, he was afraid to look because he was unsure as to what would be revealed. He dragged out the bundle and found a baby wrapped up inside. He said that I was filthy and he wasn’t sure how long I had been there alone. He also said that as soon as he picked me up and I looked at him I stopped crying, this shocked him because normally a person, especially a child, wouldn’t like the sight of his face because Nathan, my dad, was a ghoul. Ghouls are people who have been exposed to an enormous amount of radiation but somehow manage to survive. Their skin is peeling and some would be missing eyelids or lips. They can look terrifying but somehow, even as a child I didn’t think so. He admits he had to think for a few minutes as to what he would do with me. Ever since The War he had taken care of himself and now he was faced with a hard decision, to leave me, kill me or take me home. He took the blood-soaked rag off me and wrapped me in his scarf and tucked me into his coat. I didn’t cry the whole journey back to his little bunker, in fact I just fell asleep in his arms. 

Once he got me back, he needed to make sure I had food, water and a comfortable place to sleep. For the first few nights I slept in his bed with him. He put a couple of pillows beside me so I wouldn’t roll off the bed. He got into contact with his friend BB to keep an eye on me while he went out to scavenge. BB had been someone he encountered several years back when out scavenging. She had been cornered by a small group of raiders and he stepped in to help her out. She owed him her life that day and they became good friends. I remember her playing silly games with me. BB wasn’t someone who was that great with children but we always got along ok. After a few days Nathan had made a crib for me to sleep in in the same room as him. He also made a feeding chair for me to sit me in comfortably when I needed to be fed. Usually in the wastes when a woman has a baby it’s usually best the child feed from their mother because of lack of food, Nathan had to work extra hard to make sure that I didn’t go hungry, at least not for too long. 

Life was never easy but Nathan did the best he could. BB would help him out whenever he asked for it, especially if he needed to go out scavenging. A month went by before he named me, it was because he wasn’t sure if would be able to keep me. He called me Ashe because he felt it suited me. I was his daughter now and he was my father.  
When I was 9 months old, I started walking, Nathan was proud but it also frustrated him at times because I could now go wherever I pleased. The bunker wasn’t huge but large enough to lose a child occasionally. Nathan knew I needed something to occupy my time when he was working, so he made me some toys. He made them in such a way that they would be educational in engineering. He knew that the skills he had learned were precious to many people in the wastes and teaching me would be valuable someday. (He wouldn’t be wrong either.)

I spent most of my early years in the bunker because it was dangerous outside for a child. However, Nathan would try to take me outside as often as possible. He would check first making sure it was safe, and then once he was absolutely confident, he would take my hand and bring me outside. I remember seeing the world for the first time and thinking how strange it all was. I didn’t think it was pretty but it wasn’t ugly either. I liked looking up at the sky and thinking about what I wanted to be when I was older. Nathan tried to teach me about what kinds of creatures were out there, animals and insects that were mutated by nuclear radiation and were very deadly. When I asked him why he looked different to everybody else he said that many years ago there was a big explosion that made the world what it looked like today. He was living in London at the time it happened and of course the capital city was hit the worst. He hid underground with hundreds of others looking to survive the nuclear blasts. When the bombs fell, he was hurt by it but somehow didn’t die. He tried to make it sound as ‘nice’ as possible. He would later explain it to me in more detail when I was older. He said that he was exposed to a lot of radiation when the bombs dropped and destroyed the world. He survived the blast but no one could escape the radiation. It ate away at him for a long time but it wasn’t enough to actually kill him. Instead it changed him; made his skin peel away, his hair fell out, and he sadly did look frightening and hideous. Not that I cared. Nathan doesn’t know much about how it happened or why, eventually he accepted what he had become. Many people died from radiation poisoning, others became like him. He told me about the struggles of life underground with little food, people fighting each other for rations and bits to survive. He spoke of a man who came forward with the plan of granting access to his personal stores if people could pay him with Meantime Brewery bottle caps. His name was Freddie Noone. That’s how the wasteland currency started. 

After Nathan made it out of London, he pretty much kept to himself, not wanting to make alliances. He met other ghouls outside of London but many had turned feral. Feral Ghouls are people that are ghouls like Nathan but had gone mad over the years. More often they have been exposed to too much radiation and just snapped. They attack anyone on sight and have no communication skills. They are mindless creatures’ just shadows of their former selves. They sounded scary and not something I wanted to meet in a hurry. 

I didn’t meet many people in my early years or if I did, I don’t remember. The only person I defiantly remember seeing was BB. At one point she had to stay with me for a few days because Nathan had to travel to meet a client. He very rarely went out to actually meet someone but as I grew older, he started to arrange people to come to him. BB used to play all sorts of fun games with me and even brought me new clothes. Nathan would always make me new toys and BB would be the one to bring me clothes and other things that young children needed. Nathan told me few years later that BB once had a child herself but it sadly died a few days after birth. She was heartbroken and never wanted another child. At first, she didn’t want to babysit me but Nathan talked her into it and when she saw me for the first time she nearly cried. But she wanted to help Nathan and we bonded really well. I did feel sometimes that she felt sad to be around me. When Nathan came home after his travels, I was always so excited to see him and BB didn’t hang around for longer than needed. That was the way it was during those few early years. I only went outside a few times and it was only during the warmer months. 

I remember the first time I felt really scared. I was 3 or 4 years old, it was early evening and Nathan had just given me food he was trying to teach me to use a knife and fork. There were suddenly loud bangs at the door and a moment later an alarm went off and all the lights turned red. It was so loud and sudden that I started to cry. Nathan ran out of the room and didn’t come back for a few minutes. Then he grabbed me and took me to his bedroom where he told me to keep still under the covers and placed me on the bed. He tucked me in gently and pulled over the cover and told me he’d be right back and not to cry. I tried very hard not to but I was so frightened. It felt like he’d been gone for hours. I don’t know for sure how much time had passed before the loud noises stopped but when they did the lights didn’t come back on and it was pitch black. I didn’t want to come out of the covers. I had been silently crying the whole time my face was wet and sticky. I just wanted my dad to come back. I heard the big metal door open and Nathan came in with a candle and gently calling my name. He took off the cover and saw how frightened I was and picked me up in his arms and cuddled me so tightly I stopped crying, stopped being scared. He said that it was over and that I didn’t have to be afraid anymore. I still don’t know for sure what it was that happened that day but I think it was just a bunch of feral ghouls that had got disturbed by something, but I don’t know for certain.


End file.
